6.21.2007

Upgrade U: Larry from Indiana

"I've seen you guys can shoot but there's more to the game than shooting."

WHERE THEY AT: Can we dim the lights and put the "Real Talk" sign on for a sec? What the fuck is up with Legend? Did Isaiah fuck his girl at a IU/I. State Sock Hop? Did the one that got away get a pre-game peck on the private parts from Zeke? Because Larry has been a man on fire these last couple of years but instead of snatching back Dakota Fanning he's trying to snatch back those Smits/Mullin glory days. Ron Artest, Al Harrington, Stephen Jackson, RON MERCER! They got replaced like Carlton Banks' mom on Fresh Prince. It's like Bird wants a spotless mind of sunshine, forgetting all about the Isaiah Era. Now they're stuck in the middle with Mike Dunleavy JUNIOR and Troy Murphy and they can't hear one another because Jermaine O'Neal's fucking soul is SCREAMING.WHAT THEY SHOULD DO: Jim O'Brien. Solid people, I bet. He was hired by a fucking robot somewhere in a cornfield. Dumping Rick Carlisle for Jim O'Brien is, if I may get a little NSFW, like j.o.'ing with your left hand for a new sensation. Jim is still riding the buzz he got from the dawn of the decade when Walter McCarty, Extra P and Cybertoine went all...

They should've hired Mark Jackson. Or Dean Smith. Or some fucking guy who didn't major in parting his hair and footwork at Head Coach U. But they didn't. And now Jermaine drinks away the pain, surrounded by copies of Lonely Planet Los Angeles, watching this:

as a series of stills on a HD like it was a motherfucking Ken Burns doc. You can't put your arms around a memory.WHAT THEY'RE GONNA DO: The Pacers' website has this flick on the front page:

And I got Donut from The Wire in my top 8 MySpace friends. Don't mean we're gonna go out and boost a fucking Denali tomorrow night, does it? Look at the kid's face. Fuck human years; you gotta read the lines in his face like the circles in a tree stump to tell how old he is. You know who's older than Olden? JAMAAL TINSLEY. The 07-08 Pacers are looking like this:

JO is probably gonna get moved. Maybe for Andrew Bynum and the decaying shoulder cartilage of Lamar Odom. Danny Granger might blossom. He might fucking wilt. Bush got re-elected a few years ago so I guess it's possible that Dunleavy is an all-star trapped in the body of a muscular Casey Jacobsen. As of today, the Pacers are finding "International" prospects "appealing."

Good luck with that. Fuck you know about Petteri Koponen? Finland on smash! PG FOR THE HONKA PLAYBOYS.

OUTLOOK: Barring the Virgin Mary appearing in the weight room, creating a swirling surge of togetherness (and barring Shawne Williams turning into Derrick McKey), they'll be beached at .500 which, even in the East, might not be playoff-worthy.

60 Comments:

Sorry to start the comments with something off-topic, and I'm not even sure it's really worthy of a disussion. But if anywhere, here is probably the place.

I just listened to Simmons' latest podcast wiith Ric Bucher as his guest. At about 14-15 minutes left in the show their conversation turns to the relationship of NBA athletes and the media.

I'm not sure I'm doing the conversation justice by summing it up, but to me it seemed like they were tip-toeing around and trying to avoid actually saying that most black athletes (being from a rather poor background as the two agree) are not clever enough to deal with the well-schooled white reporter types. Of course they don't say it like that, but still the whole thing left me feeling quite uneasy. Opinions?

Billups on the Pacers. That's good stuff, making me care about a team I shouldn't. Maybe it's just pity for the 1.5 players I care about on that team (Marquis Daniels and kinda J.O). If Indiana is stupid enough not to hire back Carlisle, how can the Pistons be that stupid too? FLIP IS JUST NOT GREAT. He's a solid 6/10 on the coaching quality scale. Rick Carlisle has to be at least a 7, right? Oooh, also I forgot, Darrell Armstrong is fine and dandy in my book, so make it 2.5 players I might give a shit about.

kaifa: I don't know that they were really denigrating the athletes' intelligence as much as they were lamenting the way that the vast cultural divide between (predominantly black) players and the media covering them makes players' uncomfortable and open communication infinitely more difficult. They did play up the "tough socioeconomic backgrounds" angle a little heavily, but I think Simmons was really trying to get at the way that a lot of the older (mostly white) reporters who cover the NBA don't really understand or like the league, largely because they're completely incapable of relating to the American players (and possibly the internationals too but for different reasons) in any way. Like, what the hell are they going to talk to Ricky Davis about? If anything, I think Simmons, whatever his other faults may be (his sensationalist, racially loaded columns about AS weekend were, for example, awful), loathes sportswriters who hate and/or don't understand the NBA and thus do a terrible job of representing it.

And now back to the real reason I wanted to comment, Petteri Koponen. Sure, he completely fits the profile of random international dude who springs out of nowhere right before the draft, but how can you not love the giant, gangly Finnish PG? It's like Shaun Livingston redesigned as an Aryan elf! Plus, he played Derrick Rose and Mayo to a standstill at the Nike Hoops Summit. Did you see that video of him throwing a half-court alley-oop to that French dude? It was sweet! THIS IS THE MOST BALLINGEST SCANDANAVIAN CAT EVA!!! You just know everyone's going to pass on him and then the Spurs will draft him because they have a mandate to draft obscure guards from Europe and in 2 years he'll be making us all weep tears of joy with his beautiful post-entries to TD.

People who love the league have long left the 'traditional media coverage,' yesno? I mean, that's why we rather read FD or TrueHoop rather than print reporters. Simmons is on the ball on this one.

Thank you, Billups. Instead of passing by like everyone else, you actually stopped, taked a good look, and pointed out the pile of shit on the street. Bird. Trading two blacks for two whites. I wonder if Mully felt guilty. I wonder how happy Bird is with his team. I too wonder how he will draft.

HonestTea - I'm not sure that's true. I suspect the portion of people reading blogs as a way to access their NBA news - even amongst those that really love it - is pretty small. I mean just from experience - at the Rockets there were efforts to activate the fanbase using the unofficial online forum - while the effect was significant, the actual numbers represent a small percentage overall of the attendees and the fanbase. I'd wager a million Stanley nickels that the percentage of people following the NBA via the WWL's main site is many many times those who read truehoop or the bog or shanoff or FD

"Or some fucking guy who didn't major in parting his hair and footwork at Head Coach U."

Gold.

"it's possible that Dunleavy is an all-star trapped in the body of a muscular Casey Jacobsen"

I'm pretty sure Casey is more muscular than Dunleavy. Coincidentally, one of the more random moments of my life: little kid mistaking me for Casey Jacobsen and wanting my autograph.

I still go to espn.com and the like for hard news stuff, but their analyses are always the same, so I go to blogs for that. I imagine the vast majority of fans (even the ones that like the league) still go to espn.com for everything.

Re padraig: I listened to it again and you're probably right. Still it's interesting how everybody involved with the NBA in one way or another gets all tense and cautious whenever race becomes a topic.

Poll answer:

Essenheim (Germany) / way too small to be divided into different neighborhoods

Quote: "Re padraig: I listened to it again and you're probably right. Still it's interesting how everybody involved with the NBA in one way or another gets all tense and cautious whenever race becomes a topic."

Maybe its because people like you wait for someone to fuck up then go posting it on every website they've ever been to, trying to fuck with their career. I don't know.

Completely off point...but i went to college at Auburn with Marquise and had a few classes with him. Dude was nuts. Not in a psycho way, but more along the "i don't give a f*ck" way. The fact that he is an embodiment of freedarko makes perfect sense to me.

clearly I'm not disputing Billups' unmatched brilliance in somehow making the Pacers relevant for 5 minutes, but no one else wants to stick up for the 12 yr old Finnish point guard? like a 27 on a 1-10 improbability scale; picture the dude in that picture hanging out with Stephen Jackson. Whatever, Drew Gooden is half-Finnish and he's more or less from Oakland. there are so many reasons, most of which have nothing to with basketball, why I hope Koponen's around at 36 for the GSW to draft...

Poll-question: NYC born and raised. LES-raised, lived in East Harlem for long time, currently in Queens (in the future home of the Nets: LIC/Sunnyside).

On race and SImmons: I've always appreciated his attempts at honest discussions about the white media covering black athletes. That having been said, I've been turned off by his representation of himself... I mean, he's not from Boston. He's a rich boy from Connecticut who went to some of those expensive private boarding schools that make Dalton look like PS 134. That was brought to my attention not too long ago by a friend, and it kinda effects how I perceive him now....

Not that he can't speak on race and stuff, but more that he presents himself as an everyman kinda person, but he's really a very privledged guy....

It's funny how JO has no sympathy from the fan-base at large. It's understandable - we've been waiting for a while for him to do big things, and he even got to the Finals, so I suppose this is the natural tendency for people to assume his career has peaked.

What would it take for KG to suffer a similar fate? What if Minny had gotten to the Finals already and lost it - would there be less interest in and agitation for a trade scenario? Is there some achievement short of a championship that shifts a player out of 'underdog' status?

Lupica: I'm not sure that information about where Simmons went to prep school is really all that important. I understand that when writers like Simmons (and Shoals and other bloggers and columnists) bring their own personal experience and relative subjectivity to the table, they bring this sort of analysis into play. But can't we just judge the writers by their body of work? I mean, would learning where Shoals or Billups went to high school make you judge their work differently? I also never really think that Simmons has presented himself other than what he was, an upper middle class kid from Boston (or CT) who loved sports and ended up writing about it. I'm not a big fan of most of his stuff at this point, but I think it's a little juvenile to try and pick apart his ability to deal with race relations based on where his parents sent him to school, no? This is slightly akin to making the argument that if you're white, you can have nothing relevant to say about black culture, which is a divisive topic but one that not a whole lot of intelligent people could whole-heartedly support. Also, Igoudala, Andre Miller, Carney, and Al Thornton? Anyone other than Billups and I gonna be repping Sixers next year?

I appreciate Simmons's defense of black players from white writers. He obviously likes the game and the players, which does make him different from a significant portion of sports writers. But that doesn't mean that he necessarily has anything interesting to say beyond that about race and sports, particularly the NBA. To the contrary, I've found most of his comments on the subject to be fairly useless.

Bongo: I'm not saying that white writers - "privledged" or otherwise - can't add to the discussion. Definitely not saying that. My problem with Simmons is not his actual background, but his representation of himself. I don't agree with ya on that "Simmons has (not) presented himself other than what he was, an upper middle class kid from Boston (or CT)..."

I feel he has, and does, represent himself as an everyman, a former bartender from Boston that hangs out with J-Dawg, Bug, Hench, Sully. And obviously he represents that he is from Boston - he is the Boston Sports Guy, right?

And that's not really accurate.

I do agree that his columns stand by themselves, and like I said, I have always appreciated his attempts at discussing the white media vs. black athletes issues. Hell, he's probably one of the few ESPN writers who hasn't hammered Bonds that much, implying that he is aware of the media issues behind Bonds, and doesn't want to contribute to it (or so I'm guessing).

But finding out that he is an upper-class rich kid did change my perception of his columns, and how he tries not to represent himself as such, but rather as a normal guy, just like his readers. It seems phony to me, that's all... and I admit I could be making too big a deal about it....

I try to defend JO, but he makes it hard sometimes, with all of his complaining in those Indy Star interviews and such. That said, he was a near-monster in 06-07, and really turned it up on defense (check his blocks).

Jammal... who knows.

The Pacers are desperate to get fans to attend the game, so they could be interesting in coming months. Probably not though. Is anyone dumb enough to take Murphy/Mike D?

is it just me, or does that pic of koponen make him look like a mini rik smits.

with no picks and a muphy/dunleavy induced salary-cap coma in the near future, o'neal MUST be moved. that bynum/odom trade i've seen floated around to include murphy and kwame brown (kwame for his expiring contract). but of course this won't happen, more for kb24's insistence than for odom "i won't play in indiana" insistence.

.500 is a good year for these guys.

fascinating to see the first billups post in forever be about the pacers. good stuff.

laphonso: well, as luck would have it, I used to date a Finn (and surely the residual effect must subliminally figure into my Koponen advocacy) from which I learned a ton about the singularity of Finns and their kind of iffy relationship with the classic Denmark/Sweden/Norway Scandanavianess. Basically it's a cultural affiliation cos they were ruled by the Swedes for a hella long time but they speak a totally different languague (as far as I can tell, Finnish is like the 3rd weirdest/most unique language in modern Europe behind Basque and Hungarian, which is related to Finnish) and are, I was told, of a different ethnicity. So, officially, no, but it depends on the context I guess. Either way, the Finns and my own Celtic forebearers were under the thumb of various Germanic peoples (in my case, the Jutes and Saxons and Danes who became the English after subjugating the Britons) for many centuries, so me and Petteri have that in common. I'm hoping that we can take our revenge on our historical Germanic conquerors by continuing to crush Dirk's soul, or rather hopefully I'll watch as Matt Barnes dunks on him again while Kopo throws down some totally indecipherable, tight as hell Finnish trash talk.

Also, Andris Biedrins is from Latvia which is right next to Estonia; Estonia is kind of up on Finland's jock to also be a Nordic country instead of a Baltic one like Latvia and Lithuania, the other Baltic State which gave us Jasikevicius. And who did the only Estonian NBA player (Martin Muursepp!?!) ever play for? Why, the Mavs, of course. So really I just want to come full circle with the Warriors accquring more players who speak Finno-Ugric languages and then, in addition to hoodwinking Avery Johnson, Nellie will also be able to sort out whether or not Finland is a Nordic country and if Estonia belongs with the Nordic or the Baltic. Because Nellieball, contrary to popular belief, isn't just about shooting 3s as fast as you can or dunking on Kirilenko's face to take out Finland's collective frustration with the USSR invading Finland in 1939. Nellieball is also about settling thorny linguistic/cultural/ethnic knots about identity. You might even say the Baltic/Finno/Nordic question is the real fuel behind the Cuban vs. Nellie fallout.

Like the other Warriors fans, I'd love to see them take Koponen. I've only ever seen this clip (http://youtube.com/watch?v=VHBUoVgHKs0), but it's awesome, and people who saw that game say he played even with Mayo and Rose. Plus, if he succeeds there might be a rush on Honka Playboys throwbacks in the Bay Area, which I think everyone can approve of.

I'm kinda late on the Simmons stuff, but the writer-as-fan angle was his primary deal when his stuff was good. That's devolved into a combination of arrogance and a desperate need to look cool. I know those comments have been made before, but I don't think it's an issue of him wanting to look like he's not from a priviledged background--I think he just wants to be young again. So he talks about his old bartending days or hot new indie bands like the Fratellis and just looks pathetic or out of touch. That's not what really bothers me about the current stuff, though, the ridiculous arrogance is the worst. Did anyone see in the draft column from this week where he said Conley would be a reach at #3 but a no-brainer at #4? Ugh.

The Pacers are the least appealing franchise I can think of at the moment. The firing of Rick C just doesnt make sense to me. Did they expect him to win after that fucking trade? Rick C has gotten a raw deal twice now. Somebody give this guy a job please. I swear to god if Lenny Wilkens or Mike Fratello get another job before him . . .

I'm not really one to question Larry Bird, but I just don't get it. And he'll never give JO to Isiah. I couldnt be happier about that.

I don't think simmons misrepresents himself, but then again I don't really care about or try to find out about sports blogger's upbringings.

Billups is the only writer in America who can write a post on the freaking Pacers and milk 45 comments out of it. Granted, most of the comments are about race... but they were all engendered by the an entry about the Pacers. Wow.

Sorry to read this so late. The Pacers will be lucky to sniff .500 with that lineup and that coach. Who the $#@$^ is going to jack 3s?

On behalf of my beloved Bulls, i hereby offer Hinrich and, uh, Viktor Khryapa for JO. Might need to tweak it a little to get the salaries to work. This way the Pacers can get even whiter and the Bulls can draft a point guard and win the east.

Predraig = cruising an FD state of mind. Perhaps after this season we send Nellie as an envoy to the Middle East and see what he can do there?

Great that Billups is back, and word be to those who dare call out THE-GM-WHO-SHALL-NOT-BE-NAMED. As a coach, Bird=TRUE. As a player, Bird=TRUER. As a GM, BIRD=Not much better than Danny Ainge. Look, who trades Harrington, then trades for him again with extension, only to realize too late he plays the same spot as your franchise? So now, no picks, no Harrington and spiraling down to Dante's Hell Jermaine?

Anyone willing to seriously discuss the negative affects of the Bird/Dumars "At least SOME former player GMS must have 2 clues" school is higher than moses in my book. Get all those Grand Morons to the mount.

As for Carlisle, who has he killed that every coach says sayonara after 2?

Simmons isn't anymore then he ever was. He's got his schtick and he's damn good at it. But if you've been reading him for 3+ now, you're going to realize, it hasn't evolved all that much. But on his stage, with the kind of output he has to deliver it would be the rarer wordsmyth that could.

Final word = blogs may be close(r) to mainstream, but majority of world wants McDonalds. FD and ilk are no Mickey D's, or even McDowells. They are beyond that, like some small favored pub off 13 different HW exits, around 5 corners and down an alley. Some of us know it's better here. But many if not most don't even have the privilege of missing out. Word.

"That's devolved into a combination of arrogance and a desperate need to look cool."

FD defined. Check yourselves, vanilla-faces.

Oh, and please find your way to Peter Vecsey's piece about Bill Russell to hear what Russell has to say about Tim Duncan (either that or just find the equivalent of a wooden stake and drive it through your heart).

As much as he may not be their most logical choice/a crafty pre-#23 GM might snatch him up, I'd love to see the Knicks pick up a dude like Petteri. If for no other reason than to imagine how much potential fun he and Tiny would have in the locker room.

Also, say what you will about Simmons, but he is the gateway drug of hoops blogs.

I went to Oliver Miller's high school. Sophomore year, right after the Suns made their 93 run, we had "Oliver Miller Day" since he was by far the most famous alum to ever come out of there. I guess the After School Special lesson learned that day is that if you're 6'10 and a freakishly gifted athlete, then fuck that calculus shit.

i keep looking at the picture of koponen because he looks uncannily like this girl i used to see in high school. i don't know what if anything this means but i can't stop - it's like she's calling out to me across time as some platonic ideal of exciting white point guard self-actualization. but with what message?